Meritocracy Gone Astray

Sometimes a single publication captures my full attention.  It's been a while since I devoted a single post to commentary on a single article but this one has already generated many offshoots, including videos on the theme by its author.  It comes from The Atlantic, written by David Brooks whose day job pays him as columnist for the NY Times.  He also has authored a few books, mostly non-fiction commentary.  

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/12/meritocracy-college-admissions-social-economic-segregation/680392/

The piece took me several sessions to read in its entirety, then a couple more evenings to ponder its components.  David, which is probably what I would call him if we met in person, as we are contemporaries of age though of unequal legacies, takes great pride in his classical political Conservatism.  He cites Edmund Burke of Tory England as a defining figure, one focused on individual and collective freedom, which enables individual and collective achievements.  And he recognizes its flaws and its misapplications to America's contemporary political landscape.  Basically when people of talent, like him, protbably to a lesser degree like me, are permitted to perform, they will rise to the occasion.  This article explores  one form of American entitlement  shifting to another form.  He focuses on what becomes of students who enter prestige schools.  In one era, money and legacy was the entry ticket.  And those elites generated a mixed legacy with the collapse of Wall Street but very successful FDR recovery programs, WW2 victory, and post-War economic expansion.  Key academics surmised that America could do even better if it sought out innate talent from wherever it emerged, irrespective of pedigree.  A post-war expansion with educational benefits to soldier survivors generated a new talent pool that the finest educational institutions could tap, with the end point being America leading the world in any activity that depends on universithy training.  He and I are both beneficiaries of that shift, Jewish kids once limited by quotas that gave way to high grades and test scores.  We entered top universities.  He became a journalist of international influence.  I became a worthy physician to appreciative patients but did not really advance the medical field.  He cites surveys to indicate that most of the grads of these schools are like me, solid performers.  The stars come from someplace else, but they still emerge.  The Nobels may not go to Harvard alums, but they do go to faculty at these places who often attended college elsewhere.  Same with our cultural advancements, technological transformations, social agencies, and diplomats.  Talent eventually emerges, but the Ivy admissions officers are not all that adept at identifying the exceptional as they are at ranking numerical data.  Moreover, while these graduates have done many worthy things to move our collective life experience forward, an undue number devote themselves to manipulating financial markets or using math abilties to take profitable guesses on where markets might trend without improving the companies themselves or the people they employ.  In effect, solid reliable talent producing less that the optimal public outcome that the admissions reformers of the middle 20th century envisioned.  This generation produced cell phones, medicines, diagnostics, sensitivity to once marginalized groups, opportunities for women.  But these Best and Brightest also generated market fiascos, ill-advised international gambits, undue value on people who can hurdle exams and join things at a young age, and eventually a divide between winners and losers that invites a strongman with dubious alliances to hit the reset button as resentment grows.

David divides his criticism into six categories which I copied.  He answered each of them quite extensively.  I will offer my observations while critiquing his.

1. The system overrates intelligence.

Securing admission to a top school was competitive in my day, even more so in my children's era, as we all attended the same university.  An Admissions staff will receive maybe ten times as many applications as they can accommodate.  Most of those hopefuls could navigate the curriculum requirements.  So they need to distinguish one person from another.  From my HS class I knew the few who got into the Big 3 Ivies.  They all had stronger academic transcripts and scores than me, except for our football quarterback, a wonderful young man of color in a school where the Jews dominated the classrooms.  Still, being a QB, taking challenging courses with decent performance, and having a father who served on the faculty of our regional Ivy made him successful.  But for the most part, the classmates with the best transcripts got into the most selective schools.  Those on the second tier, like me, attended the next tier school.  One from my tier became a superstar.  Everyone else still got to go to college someplace.  We produced doctors, lawyers, engineers.

Might my own school have been better with a different collection of kids?  Or might I have achieved more were I not up against kids who hurdled the requirements with the same proficiency as me?  No way to know.  However, fifty years have passed since commencement.  We know how everyone did.  That's not true the Millenial classes my children attended or the current Gen Z.  But people turned down by the admissions committees, as I was, still had an adult future to attain someplace else.

2. Success in school is not the same thing as success in life. 

My class in HS and university generated some very productive people, rewarded financially and with symbols of prestige in the form of titles and admiration.  The HS classmate who became an international CEO went to a small division of a state school.  A few very undistinguished students built very profitable small businesses.  We are economically and culturally successful.  That is not the same as being personally successful.  My marriage has endured an adult lifetime.  My children are worthy successors.  I knew to retire when I could no longer excel.  I have no idea how others fared.  Divorces are common as are blended families.  No doubt some had personal misadventures.  I never generated a lot of friends and chafed at working as part of a team where I would have to cede autonomy.  Some would regard this as failure.  Did I reach my potential?  Did my place on the Admissions committee hierarchy squeeze out another applicant who might have benefited more?  No way to know.  Since we make ample incomes, did we save prudently or announce Look at Me through our purchases?  Improper pretense existed.  People less generous with their treasure that their educations enabled also likely prevalent.  I think I have been successful at what mattered, my marriage, descendants, economic security, and a modicum of generosity in excess of what my less well-off parents were able to offer.

3. The game is rigged. 

Rigged isn't the right term.  Understanding the revised rules, acquiring experience with outcome, and setting strategies that achieve the outcome describe the process better.  It is not conceptually that different from prevailing at anything else from a football game to a retirement nest egg.  If the experience that graduates of prestige schools have lucrative, personally satisfying careers, preparing to attend one becomes a priority.  We know how Admissions Officers assess applications.  We know what they ask on the applications.  If they seek the Best and Brightest, those with credentials, then get the credentials.  And as in golf or bowling, there are handicaps to make up the difference.

Do some people have advantages?  For sure.  Tall people have an advantage being on the school's basketball team.  People with certain capacities create better art.  And both can be coached to surpass their inherent advantages.  My family could not afford to have me experience a summer in Europe or a tutor to get me over some calculus obstacles, or private music lessons.  I and many others made the best of what we had.  My classmates in the 1970s seemed of similar background.  We were people who took the challenging curriculum, had been successful with standardized testing since the Iowa tests of early grade school, knew how to write a coherent composition though less well than our future professors thought we should.  Within those classes, we had HS jocks who excelled at sports, a few physics nerds.  We also had kids less academically capable admitted to the class as it benefited the university in some way.  Some were scions of large donors that the school would need to offer its programs to everyone.  Others brought special talents, and some were kids of social disadvantage who excelled in their city or rural HS environment but would struggle in their new classrooms.

Rather than rigged, or offering unfair advantage to one group over another, I think the better criteria would be whether the classes that they ulimately assemble bring credit to the university that selected them among the excess of applicants.  For the most part they do.  And as they move on, becoming fifty-year alumini as I did and David will soon be, did we derive benefit from what our elite schools with its array of opportunities made available?  I think the vast majority did.  And do we accept people who fell at a different stratum in the college scramble in a dignified way when they become our colleagues or neighbors later?  I think we did.

4. The meritocracy has created an American caste system.

Social strata in America and globally predate contemporary times.  Across history, a certain amount of social mobility, upward and downward, existed.  Slavery was a global reality for much of history.  So were people who left the farm to seek fortune as soldiers or merchants.  There were physical conquests of warfare or colonialism that defined who people were and the opportunities they might have as individuals or as groups.  History also has its rebellions and its remodeling.  Rather than a caste system, which we think of as the model of India which is an immutable legacy, what contemporary America seems to show is loss of economic and social advancement opportunities that were once accepted.  That may be true but blaming it on the decisions of a few elite institutions probably isn't.

Social mobility in American history, as taught to me by some pretty astute teachers, came in waves.  Just crossing the ocean on a one-way ticket shut some doors and opened others.   The Africans brought here in chains had no freedom and the natives pushed aside by settlers lost stature from their starting points.  Over time, though, the consequences of doing this had a mixture of benefits and harm.  Policies by those in authority largely expanded economic upgrades to those of European ancestry, whether land for ownership, educational mandates for children, absorption of immigrants into an already established economy, or projects of philanthropy for public benefit.  After economic fiascos from monopolies to depressions, corrective protections were also put into place by those given rightful authority, with a blend of favorable and unfavorable consequences.

The Meritocracy era as David describes came in my father's generation.  The big state universities already existed, authorized and supported since the time of the Civil War.  Transportation already existed.  Manufacturing capacity sufficient to prevail in two world wars already existed.  So did financial institutions and taxation in its various forms.  What changed was expansion of who could access them.  The government committed funds to help my father go to college on their dime in appreciation of bodily risk he and many others experienced. And home ownership benefited the new owners like my father as well as the American economy.

All people who become newly prosperous have to decide what to do with the money they have but never expected to have.  Andrew Carnegie wrote of this as the Gospel of Wealth, but for most it was more personal prosperity.  And the people who are now well-paid, wearing ties to work, consumed some and invested some, including in their children.  So as David and I of the same generation learned, our expectations were rooted in economic security which becomes part opportunity, part safety net for when we fail.  We could access the top educational facilities, but also our state universities.  We could then take those degrees and the abilities to which they attest and offer them to employers needing people like us.  

Our generation that benefited from expanded access did not create the institutions that now welcomed us, though with some strings attached and rules that we needed to follow.  The Ivies had already achieved their acclaim, the corporations that bought us aboard were largely established, even the emerging broadcast industry, our federal and local governments needed civil service talent to serve the public.  We filled those needs, but with few exceptions did not create them.  And while Trickle Down Economics has been discredited for good reason, as we became economically secure, we did not abandon or undermine those who did not get the same economic attainment.  Instead, we traveled on highways designed by civil engineers but built by construction workers, purchased cars initially from Detroit but accepted a variant meritocracy when Toyota built more reliable vehicles, bought products transported to our stores by teamsters, and admired public parks maintained by less educated landscapers.  We wished none ill will.  Rather the mindset was more share our abundance.

Along the way, that social mobility and also interaction between economic strata got interrupted, though we were not the ones to do that.  What changed, in quantum steps methinks, are the interactions.  Starting with the draft, the ultimate in forced social mingling, at least for men, WW2 drafted Kennedys and ranch hands.  Vietnam did not.  And then for defensible reasons, a professional voluntary army requiring a certain literacy attainment to function excluded the school dropouts.  The universities became the next mixture point, one that has shifted from rousing success to troublesome as David outlines for most of his essay.  We have neighborhoods.  They have always been segregated by levels of prosperity along with ethnicity.  We have in more recent decades the decline of intergenerational hometowns, where at least everyone who lived there went to the same HS.  And we have decline of the churches, another place where people of different backgrounds met in the same place.  More recently, we have our devices, the ultimate in customized ME with grudging interaction with anyone else and disregard for who might take offense.  Those are the institutional failures that create strata, if not actually castes.  The evolution of who gets into what school over two generations reflects that.  I don't think it caused it.

5. The meritocracy has damaged the psyches of the American elite. 

David and I progressed through our universities unscathed.  I think my kids did too.  The need to divert from your natural interests to jump through the various admissions hoops is worth it for some, but damaging to others.  Despite this childhood deprivation, a very real circumstance, David also acknowledges the long-term payoff.  Economic security that endures for most, with the opportunities for professional and personal growth that go with it, offsets the sacrifice of parts of one's childhood.  Better health, less divorce, less substance abuse, esteem from others.  All big long-term gains that are hard to attain by alternate paths.  Those seem to enhance the psyche.  Since to hurdle Admissions, childhood becomes more regimented than it might otherwise be, adapting to campus regimentation should be no harder or easier than is for other kids who enter young adulthood in different regulated environments like the military or many workplaces.  The campus experience has changed since my time there two generations ago.  I think political correctness is more enforced.  We certainly had our pressured conformities, be it Vietnam opposition or support for Candidate McGovern, though we retained our respect for professors who preferred Nixon like the rest of adult America.  I think that respect element has evaporated for a lot of reasons.  The professors outside the sciences are more ideological.  In my era, George Wallace was a much sought-after campus speaker.  We held up signs but did not interfere with his lecture.  People are too quick to cancel or even punish certain ideologies.  Some of what we absorbed as Derech Eretz, the Hebrew term for good interpersonal relations, has given way to shouting ME and playing Wack-a-Mole with you.  People of the Instagram era seem too focused on their flaws, but I don't think the upper levels of Academy caused that.  More likely that smartphone-internet driven blend of vanity and insecurity was created before the first college application got submitted and was imported to the campus with all its linkages.

Did the quest to attain that Fat Letter from the Admissions office, or now the congratulatory email, cause the fretful, often intolerant emerging adults who populate the campus?  No, it was imported to the campus.  And since these are the kids of needed talent, they will export more to our workplaces, civil service, and beyond in the form of litmus tests for what is acceptable thought, training programs that everyone has to take to make them as sensitive as everyone else in those workplaces.  Conformity has its place.  Our military might would vanish without it.  But harmful standards have a way of being propagated until reformed, which eventually they seem to be.

6. The meritocracy has provoked a populist backlash that is tearing society apart.

Little dispute that we have divisions, including some element of backlash, or at least resentment.  Real financial capitalists of extreme wealth have largely been forgiven.  Knowledge capitalists, those top university grads of more attainable wealth, the very people the ultrawealthy need to run their enterprises, have taken the hit. Voting patterns reflect those alliances and resentments.  The coastal states most dependent on college-trained expertise vote one way, an ever-expanding American interior vote another.  Swing states were once Tennessee and Missouri, now they are Pennsylvania and Nevada.  Yet resentments have been ingrained into American history.  Control of the government shifts every few election cycles.  Dixie resented Reconstruction disruptions enough to enact Jim Crow Laws, then their Democratic congressmen who had reason for economic alliances with Northern Democrats, found backlash to Civil Rights legislation to flip parties.  Workers once depended on the economic benefits of unions, which could protect wages but not keep the plants on American soil.  They flipped, but not before seeing their wages of their auto and steel plants becoming the lower wages of retail workers.  Neither the Confederate nostalgics nor the displaced union members got what they sought.  Acceptance of public access of races to restaurants and state universities is accepted and demeaning references marginalized.  The union guys have not brought the jobs back from Asia irrespective of how they vote.  They are left to nurse their resentments.  Meanwhile, Smart America, those targets of resentment, continue to engage in the creative work that advances technology, makes their doctors more effective, and travel more accessible.  They resent the producers of these, but partake of what has been produced.

In some ways educated America functions as the social croupiers.  It makes no difference who controls the government.  As long as the expertise has value and scarcity, we will prosper.

Over a much longer time frame, useful institutions have been devalued, whether the government agencies, those very elite universities that David now critiques, what we see on our screens, the people we must hire to keep our cars mobile and our homes functional.  The respect that expertise or skill once brought has been targeted very successfully in exchange for resentment-driven votes.  I think its roots lay a lot deeper than the annual scramble for college acceptance decisions.

Moving past David's Six Elements Meritocracy's Flaws, his question of whether our systems generate the best leaders is a very real one.  I will site two offshoots, one a presentation by a Jewish thought leader who I much admire, the other a written reaction to David's column in her student newspaper from one of the elite schools that David bashes.

Bari Weiss graduated one of the Ancient Eight, securing a position at the pinnacle of journalism.  She gave it up to become an electronic journalism entrepreneur on Substack, while also writing and speaking extensively about the scourge of Anti-Semitism emerging from social margins to mainstream, particularly on our campuses.  Most visibility at the universities of David's essay, my own alma mater among them.  Bari gave a speech which I watched on YouTube.  She addressed what is called the General Assembly, a collection of the highest youthful Jewish achievers, the recipients of that stardust that displays how wonderful they all are.  As her litany of anti-Semitic incidents proceeded over the next few minutes, how they were the ones who had to act to reverse it, my half-century of Jewish immersion, Jewish experience flashed back.  Every one of those circumstances on her list occurred with the Best and Brightest of the Jewish community, the highest achievers with titles seeping over the internet, in place.  Just like Ivy League parents groom their children to follow them, the Jewish organizations engage in a similar form of institutional incest.  They get good people, but choose them as obedient proteges.  Those kids listening to Bari at the podium probably never had their Hebrew School teacher complain about them.  They made Honor Roll another designation where obedience overrides intellect, went to Ramah, held offices in Hillel.  Saluted when told to salute.  In the two generations where this constituted the most admired, or at least the most titled, the synagogues that form the core institution of American Judaism have lost membership.  Donors to agencies give more money to the treasuries because the ability to give large sums has expanded.  However, fewer individuals donate.  I could only think like David describing colleges, they picked people less capable than they could have had by setting inferior identification criteria and allowing compliance or affibility to become a surrogate for talent.  The price was high.

A student writing for  The Princetonian, an African-American woman, focused primarily on David's assertion that meritocracy created a rigged game. 

https://www.dailyprincetonian.com/article/2024/11/princeton-opinion-column-meritocracy-admissions-david-brooks-ivy-league

Despite her attendance at a school that did not accept my son, she conveys a blend of perpetual victimhood and ingrained unfairness that defies correction.  I don't know if she's right, but it's more productive to see oneself as the agent of moving forward in a better direction.  The Rebbe, z"l, used to receive people seeking his sage guidance.  Often they conveyed to him misfortunes, hoping his wisdom will create a path for more favorable outcomes.  Invariably, the Rebbe would respond to the petitioner in distress, that his circumstance was a Gift from God, a chance to hit the reset button, put the thinking cap on, reject inertia.  And the Rebbe would then make the first suggestion. Nothing is really doomed.  Not our politics, antagonisms, nor our impediments to giving each person their best shot to take.

Anti-Semitism from Afar

My introduction to the thoroughly inhumane attacks by a planned initiative from a Gaza militia on Israeli civilians came as an announcement from our Rabbi as we davened shacharit on Simchat Torah, a day in which traditional Jews keep the electronics turned off.  In the ensuing six months, the responses from around the world, and many places in America where American Jews have been thoroughly engaged for some three generations, have made this an inflection point.  A Sentinel Event for sure.  A Never Event, probably.  Hostility to Israel, the one place in the world that accepts Jews in political distress and offers us sovereignty, has always been an undertone of political discussion.  It is no longer an undertone.  In America, we have political displacement as those chronically uneasy affiliations with the minority communities sink with a predictable mutual detriment.  I find opportunists only too eager to flip the majority Jewish vote a generation after the white wage-earner vote was flipped. 

Within the Jewish community, I read essays by Jews on the political right too eager to purge their organizations of individuals who challenge their hardball pro-Israel and intersected politically conservative agenda.  They seem totally oblivious to a certain reality that the people they wish to evict from their Jewish circles may be the people they need to support nursing homes, Hebrew Schools, and a campus presence.  They've made certain Jews expendable by ideology.

Amid this, some people gifted with that blend of knowledge, experience, saichel, and the ability to craft paragraphs that flow from one to another have brought upper-tier analysis to the forefront.  Two seminal essays appeared in The Atlantic, both rather lengthy but I read each in their entirety.  A response of somewhat lesser length appeared in The Forward.  Several years ago, I decided to add two subscriptions as a semi-annual initiative.  I selected The Atlantic and The Forward.  Good decisions, renewed each year since.

Since the response in The Forward incorporates the other two, and takes a very different position on how American Jews should best grapple with the many dilemmas and uncertainties of where we find ourselves, I add my own comments to that essay.  And while anti-Semitism has become more publicly explicit, my own personal exposure has been mostly from afar.  Shuls have more visible security, but that predated the Gaza attacks.  And the synagogue where I was married had two vandalism events.  But I still appear in public as the best representative of Judaism that I can be with no realistic fear for my personal safety.  

These are the original publications:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/04/us-anti-semitism-jewish-american-safety/677469/

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/02/jewish-anti-semitism-harvard-claudine-gay-zionism/677454/

 https://forward.com/opinion/600187/antisemitism-united-states-israel-gaza-war/

The growing panic about antisemitism isn’t a reflection of reality

Yes, antisemitism is up — but prominent voices are confusing protest with bigotry

American Jews are being whipped into a panic about antisemitism.

There is no doubt that incidents of antisemitism have increased since Oct. 7. But prominent voices in the American Jewish community are making it harder to fight. Would challenge this They have mistaken political protest — however misguided — for bigotry some of it is bigotry, conflated anti-Zionism and antisemitism there are Americans being attacked because they are identifiable as Jewish or their property is damaged because it identified as belonging to Jews, and exaggerated the crisis on the far left while ignoring the far greater one on the far right.  We can argue whether either is a crisis

I do not question the motivations of those who have spoken out against antisemitism in this way. We are all in pain, and we all want a world in which people of all backgrounds can live their lives in safety. But the rampant hyperbole, confusion, and both-sidesing of this present moral panic are making it harder, not easier, to respond effectively.

 

Bottom of Form

Antisemitism is rising because of a brutal war

For example, consider two widely circulated recent essays in The Atlantic, “The Golden Age of American Jews is Ending,” by Franklin Foer, and “Why The Most Educated People in America Fall for Antisemitic Lies,” by Dara Horn. Both attribute the rise in antisemitism to the resurgence of an ancient, timeless hatred, rather than the obvious proximate cause: a brutal war, which is producing images of unthinkable horror to be streamed daily on social media.  I think it is.  The response on campuses defending the attackers as heroic was immediate.  The condemnation of the President’s response was immediate.  And it was the Islamic, African-American, and progressive elements that emerged essentially immediately.  The very real human cost in Gaza came a short time later.  There was no acknowledgment of the nature of the attack itself or condemnation of the glee many attackers displayed.

In Foer’s 11,000-word piece, few sentences mention the ongoing catastrophe in Gaza, where more than an estimated 32,000 Palestinians have been killed so far. “I don’t want to dismiss the anger that the left feels about the terrible human cost of the Israeli counterinvasion of Gaza, or denounce criticism of Israel as inherently antisemitic — especially because I share some of those criticisms,” he writes.  Much of it is very anti-Semitic, and has been.  The exclusion of American Jews from progressive causes such as BLM was a work in progress.  So was the difficulty in defining anti-Semitism for formal policy purposes as Jewishness has been inseparable from Jewish sovereignty. While I think Franklin Foer is wrong about the end of the American Jewish Golden Age (yes, I did read all 11K words over two sessions)  the virulence of the protests and its direction towards American Jews speaks for itself.  What I think he got wrong is the ability of American Jews to create things, whether institutions for our and public advancement, philanthropy, ideas, or expertise.  Those all remain valuable and don’t seem threatened.

But that is, effectively, exactly what he does, ascribing the increase in antisemitism to anti-liberal trends in American culture, and describing antisemitism as “a mental habit, deeply embedded in Christian and Muslim thinking, stretching back at least as far as the accusation that the Jews murdered the son of God.” The war is barely even an inciting incident.  I think that’s another area where Foer is wrong. Father Coughlin, Henry Ford, and Charles Lindbergh have all been discredited on a one-way ticket in America, though my Islamic medical colleagues tell me the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is required reading in some of their history curriculum in their Middle Eastern primary schools.  The American parochial school kids no longer seek out the Jewish kids for taunting when school lets out.  But in the Islamic communities and in some of our community of color, mistrust of Jews as Jews is still conveyed through household.  And it is usually tied to a justification, whether over-extending their dhimmi status by having a sovereign state or oppression as slumlords.

Horn, like Foer, largely dismisses concerns about the war. The word “Gaza” only appears six times in her essay. Yes, she writes, there are “the many legitimate concerns about Israel’s policies toward Palestinians and the many legitimate concerns about Israel’s current war in Gaza.” But those “cannot explain these eliminationist chants and slogans” — e.g. “Palestine from River to Sea” — “the glee with which they are delivered, the lawlessness that has accompanied them, or the open assaults on Jews.”  She got it right.

There are numerous omissions in this short passage: How many protests are gleeful? Certainly the primary attacks were.  I think they take more of a form of revenge  Defacing property, intimidating expression, making credible threats to safety, and locking Jews in campus rooms has its illegal elements.    (Few that I’ve seen.) What percentage are lawless? Is “‘river to the sea” always ‘eliminationist,’ despite what many pro-Palestine voices insist?   It has that intent. f But as the response acknowledges later, these chants come from people with no authority and therefore no accountability.  Having the onus of implementation of this desire would change the approach.  Then again, the Gazans are eliminationinst in their manifesto and acted as if this attack were one episode in the larger initiative.

Most significantly, though, both Horn and Foer write as if this is the first time in history that a war or catastrophe has provoked bigotry. But this is always the case. Just as Islamophobia rose after 9/11, and just as anti-Asian hate rose with the onset of the pandemic, so antisemitism is rising now. One could even say the same about anti-German and anti-Japanese stereotypes in the 1940s. or the ending of slavery in America or calling sauerkraut Liberty Cabbage.  The wars proceed because the sides object vehemently to each other.  But irrespective of precedent, we need not tolerate this or rationalize it now.

None of this is to excuse these spikes in bigotry, or to deny that the bigotry exists and is dangerous. It is only to note that the most obvious explanation for the current eruption is not a grand meta-narrative of American or European history, but rage at an ongoing war in which Israel’s conduct has received widespread international condemnation.

No, anti-Zionism is not antisemitism

Second, the moral panic conflates legitimate anti-Zionism with illegitimate antisemitism.  Not understanding why one is legitimate and another is not.  Certainly Popes for a thousand years thought their targeting of Jews was legit.  So did inquisitors.  So did Romans and Babylonias who created our diaspora.  All are interferences with pre-existing established Jewish norms.

Foer’s essay begins with a harrowing account of a Jewish high school student in Berkeley, California, who was “scared” by “a planned ‘walkout’ to protest Israel.” I do not doubt that this student was scared. But what actually happened? A misguided political protest, along with unsubstantiated rumors of “phrases shouted in the hallways, carrying intimations of violence.” It is not antisemitism whenever Jewish people are upset by anti-Israel actions or statements.  No, Jay, it is about fear for safety.  The statements were somewhat normative in a past era, whether by Spielberg’s fictional portrayals in The Fablemans or by encounters with parochial school students in my youth.  The difference is that the fear was not justified, though Spielberg’s character was in fact assaulted.  And Kristallnacht was a very real episode in history.  The kids at that Northern California HS attended that HS the year before.  Their fear is now.

Foer also reports secondhand accounts of Jewish students at other schools in the Bay Area being targeted and harassed in ways that are clearly antisemitic. But he lumps these incidents togethter as if they are the same, which they are not. Protesting against Israel, however misguided or disturbing, is not antisemitic; harassing Jews is.  But one becomes justification  for the other, and inseparable from the fears of the victim of physical harm

Foer asserts, without support, that the left “espouses a blithe desire to eliminate the world’s only Jewish-majority nation … valorizes the homicidal campaign against its existence, and seeks to hold members of the Jewish diaspora to account for the sins of a country they don’t live in.” Notice the elisions: Foer blends together anti-Zionism, support for a “homicidal campaign,” and targeting Jews. (Even the caricature of anti-Zionism is incorrect, as many on the left support a democratic state where Jews would still be a majority, but all would have equal rights.)  Certainly most of the anti-Zionists and Islamists do not attack Jews because they are Jewish.  I’m sure Jewish and Islamic physicians share patients as before, both in America and in Israel.  But as we learned in Pittsburgh, where the slain doctor was a college friend and in Monsey where I was raised, it only requires a few real threats to be deadly, irrespective of how the majority behave.  What matters is the failure of condemnation.  That is new.

This conflation of antisemitism and anti-Zionism is far greater than a few articles. As reported in the Forward, after Oct. 7, the Anti-Defamation League changed its criteria to define a much broader swath of anti-Zionist activity as antisemitic; anti-Zionist protests account for 1,317 of the 3,000-odd “antisemitic” incidents the organization tracked in the three months after Oct. 7. So they agree that Oct 7 is a demarcation point that changes what is acceptable levels of intimidation. As Forward reporter Arno Rosenfeld wrote, “a large share of the incidents appear to be expressions of hostility toward Israel, rather than the traditional forms of antisemitism that the organization has focused on in previous years.”  Except that these incidents are directed at American Jews because they are Jewish.  Much like Venn diagram circles that intersect.

The extremism of some left-wing responses to the war is indeed troubling. I agree with Foer’s dismay that “a disconcertingly large number of Israel’s critics on the left did not … share that vision of peaceful coexistence, or believe Jews had a right to a nation of their own.” But are they antisemitic? Yes.  Their Venn Diagrams also intersect with other things. And what about Jewish anti-Zionists (many of whom are friends of mine) — are we really to believe that they are all trapped in some neurosis of self-hatred?  Or do they have a political view to which many of us object?  I’m not sure I know any Jewish anti-Zionists who think that Herzl, Ben Gurion, and Holocaust refugees who settled in Israel were a blight on world history.  I think they don’t want the people there now to have to move on like they did in Spain.  There are criticisms of the government and have been since Begin made Likud the dominant party nearly fifty years ago.  The gripes are with policies and innocent human pawns, not with Jewish sovereignty.

I am a progressive Zionist. Even if the dream seems dim today, I believe in a two-state solution with justice for Palestine and security for Israel. But while Foer’s language of “a nation of their own” sounds benign in principle, in practice, it has meant a nation that displaces another people and denies its 5 million members basic civil rights. Except that it was prompted by a number of attacks that made an offense the best defense.  That rarely appears in these essays from either side.  Nor does the other reality that peace has been achieved among other former antagonists that acknowledge the reality of their neighbor Israel.  For all the talks and proposals, the Palestinians, or the Egyptians before them, never had to submit their wish list of what it would take to reconcile, while the Israelis and the Americans did.  Baseball may have had the right idea.  Each states their demands. The more reasonable is accepted with little negotiation.  Deals are often better when each side has an incentive to consider that if too demanding, they lose.  Moreover, an entire generation of American progressives has grown up during a period in which Israel’s right-wing governments have successfully undermined any efforts toward peace and coexistence. It is not antisemitic to oppose this. For many people, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, it is just.  Begin was the first right wing government.  The Abrahamic Accords came with Netanyahu at the helm.  Jews visiting Petra started in 1983.  It is much less the government than the partner’s trustworthiness.

Right-wing antisemitism remains the greatest threat

The moral panic regarding antisemitism also overlooks an essential truth: that although antisemitism on the left is real, and arguably escalating, it still pales in comparison to antisemitism on the right.  Until they both become deadly.  The right has had lethal episodes for a while.  From the American left, this is new.

After a shocking upsurge during the Trump administration, right-wing antisemitism has now reached unprecedented proximity to power. One particularly serious example: Mark Robinson, the Republican candidate for governor of North Carolina. Robinson is an antisemite and Holocaust denier. In 2017, he wrote that “there is a REASON the liberal media fills the airwaves with programs about the NAZI and the ‘6 million Jews’ they murdered.” (Robinson is also a sexist, homophobe, and Islamophobe.)  He hasn’t been elected yet.  And once in office, NC has laws that limit his implementation of policies that target Jews for harassment.  Compare that to DEI programs at our universities, which while well intended, function as zero sum game to promote one identity, whether of color or LGBT over previously excluded minorities who have proven themselves, as in Jews and Asians.  There is political power of people you never see and leverage against you by people that you encounter daily.

This man isn’t a misguided high school teacher or student activist. He may become the next chief executive of the ninth most populous state in our union. He’s been highly praised by Donald Trump. This is extreme antisemitism at the highest levels of the GOP.

And, of course, there’s Elon Musk, who despite his Auschwitz apology tour has platformed — and personally reposted — hardcore antisemites, including Trump. Not to mention Kanye West, now known as Ye, whose public antisemitism has aligned with a sharp right-wing political turn, and whose most recent album went to the top of the charts.  But he doesn’t deny people on the left access to his platforms either.

No one accused of antisemitism on the far left has a platform comparable to either of theirs. Again, none of this is to excuse the presence or tolerance of antisemitism on the left — only to put it in perspective.  Actually I think DEI affects a lot more Jews diligently striving to be their best self a lot more than anything Ye can influence.

Yet in Foer’s telling, they are merely two manifestations of the same phenomenon. “In the era of perpetual crisis,” Foer writes, “a version of this narrative kept recurring: a small elite — sometimes bankers, sometimes lobbyists — maliciously exploiting the people. Such narratives helped propel Occupy Wall Street on the left and the Tea Party on the right.”  Or in another era of Mayor Lindsay, my HS era, you live in squalor because of your Jewish landlord and his partner at the furniture store.  Some would say the quest for rights without accountability.  My assessment of the Palestinian avocates today.

But wait a minute. Occupy’s narrative is accurate, but the Tea Party’s is not. Occupy rails against the 1% — they exist. The Tea Party rails against imagined “elites” — now imagined, as part of the QAnon conspiracy theory, as cabals of globalist pedophiles. And when a single protester in Zuccotti Park raised an antisemitic banner, people intervened, and the movement reaffirmed its opposition to antisemitism. There is no equivalence here.  Or really, one is more credible than the other.

Likewise, Foer claims that “America’s ascendant political movements — MAGA on one side, the illiberal left on the other — would demolish the last pillars of the consensus that Jews helped establish.  That’s the one part where he seems accurate. They regard concepts such as tolerance, fairness, meritocracy, and cosmopolitanism as pernicious shams.” Really? Rightly or wrongly, the left thinks they’re fighting for fairness and tolerance — or at least against starving a million children as part of a brutal war. Or BML or DEI.  Noble concepts until you start excluding people who would like to be helpful.  These long pre-dated the Gazan casualties. The right is fighting for an American nationalist ethno-state. There is simply no symmetry here.  I think more likely there is a gap between what they claim they want and what they will insist upon if returned to power.  Moral Majority has been around a long time, as have megachurches.  So has the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  Never heard a peep about a legislative repeal.  Not a word about restricting the cultural practices of those already here.  The Asian and Middle Eastern restaurants in the Deep South are pretty safe.  If migrant workers are needed to harvest rural crops in George Wallace country, the hiring will go on as before.  And from our end as Jewish multicultural advocates that enabled our achievements in the wide culture, we have no reason to restrict their hunting hobbies.  Abortions ended in my lifetime.  My OB text, circa 1975, still had a chapter on septic abortions which disappeared.  I doubt if the Christian nationalists, for all their rhetoric, want that medical condition to return.

Terrified, tribalistic and isolated

The moral panic over antisemitism isn’t just factually unsound. It’s helping make American Jews more isolated and paranoid.  But with reason.  We weren’t that way last Rosh HaShanah.

It’s obvious that American Jews are feeling disoriented, terrified and traumatized by Oct. 7, as well as by much of the world’s mixed response to that day’s horrific violence. The trauma of the last several months — experienced, in various forms, by Jews, Muslims, progressives and many others — has contributed to the degeneration of our public discourse on the war.  The public discourse on a lot of other things had not gone well before that.

But our moral panic is at once born of this trauma and making it worse. It has caused Jews to become even more terrified and tribalistic. Terrified isn’t the right word, nor is tribalistic.  After the Pittsburgh massacre took my own medical friend, the condemnation was universal.  The condemnation of the Simchat Torah attack is a long way from universal.  And we haven’t done well protecting each other.  On the Jewish Trump side, there are calls to purge Jews who find him objectionable from some mainstream organizations that they dominate.  And it has precedent.  The heavy-handedness of Hillel International on its own chapters that challenged the Zionist litmus test of the parent organization took place before the current millenium.ro The reality is that most of us go to shul at the appointed times, though with enhanced security.  Companies have not withdrawn their Hechshers in solidarity with the anti-Zionist or anti-Jewish pressures.  Hiring goes on as before.  If we were economically prosperous before, that has not been reversed.   It has undermined our solidarity with other vulnerable groups at precisely the time at which we are threatened by the nationalist right. Forgive me, but a number of progressiove organizations expressed their hostility to Jewish participation in their movements years ago.  And it has fed the illiberal campaigns of right-wing culture warriors, who have preyed on American Jewish fears to further their own agendas. Or they understand Maslow’s hierarchy.  You protect your safety before you seek the higher noble principles. We are being fed a diet of hyperbole and misinformation, and we are reacting out of fear.  Except that elements of that fear are both legit and ever closer to home.

To be sure, some progressives responded abominably to Oct. 7, and continue to use irresponsible, incendiary rhetoric about Israel. And we need to be very consistent about identifying them and what they are about. We spend too much effort fighting with each other. There are outrageous things happening on some college campuses. And we have to be openly oppositional to that with negative consequences for outrageous activity. But let’s not lose the thread here. The real crisis is not leftists on campus but white nationalists, insurrectionists, election deniers, science deniers and conspiracy theorists seizing two if not three branches of the federal government. Actually it is the loss of partnership with the progressives that make these people confident that their majority will eventually emerge.  And we are not the ones who undermined that uneasy but protective partnership. That is the Titanic. College activists are the string quartet playing on the deck.

Finally, the consequences of this fatalistic view that antisemitism is everywhere, and that it can never be eradicated, are dark indeed. Professor Shaul Magid has called it “Judeo-Pessimism,” taking a cue from “Afro-Pessimism,” a view that holds that racism can never be eradicated.  Like medical conditions, rarely cured, mostly successfully managed.

For Judeo-Pessimists, antisemitism is a kind of immortal, recurring hatred that simply is part of Western culture; again, Foer describes it as a “mental habit, deeply embedded in Christian and Muslim thinking.” As such, antisemitism can be fought but never destroyed.  That seems to be where anti-Semitism has gone historically.  And as Bari Weiss recommended in her book on this, the best defense is to be the most visibly honorable Jew you can be,

The natural endpoint of such a view is perpetual paranoia, together with an extreme form of right-wing Zionism.  Not at all.  Zionism has always been part of our consensus.  What we have stopped doing internally is seeking the Middle.  It tells us that we cannot trust the international community, and can only trust Jewish strength.  It dismisses human rights concerns, since the oppression of our enemies is the regrettable price of Jewish survival. Often it is.   Because if we are always and everywhere oppressed, then the Jewish future lies not in engagement with wider society, but in our strength in opposition to it.  Not at all.  Even in our darkest times, we have always had buffers, whether the Turks and Dutch of Inquisition times, Righteous Gentiles during Nazi domination, and the liberal ideologies in America that Franklin Foer and Dana Horn described in their essays.

This is a bleak vision, and reflective of the trauma which gave birth to it.  The Lachrymose View of Jewish History has its element of accuracy.

To be sure, there are good reasons to be scared right now. But the human capacity for freedom lies in our ability to transcend that fear — to recognize it and not be controlled by it. We can recognize that the better angels of our nature are not naive, but are wiser and more trustworthy than our passions, even when they are felt strongly. Moral panic is not the way forward.

Rabbi Jay Michaelson is a contributing columnist for the Forward and for Rolling Stone. He is the author of 10 books, and won the 2023 New York Society for Professional Journalists award for opinion writing.

 

ReportingThem

For all the rise in Anti-Semitism that has emerged over a few years gradually and over a few months more rapidly, I had not personally encountered any other than more honorable people retweeting a comment made somewhere on their Twitter screens for the purpose of criticizing what they had seen.  I got my first two yesterday.  They occurred on Reddit's r/Judaism, each just a phrase or a sentence.  Neither had any comments.  I selected the Report option, clicked the Hate icon, then submit.  My email contained two messages from u/reddit that the umpire, which I assume is what u/ designates, agreed that company posting policy had been violated.

Neither of these posts had received any comments from the users who engage in r/judaism.  And since the platform provides neutral names to its users to minimize any personal identification, I could not know anything about the poster.  Could be Islamic, could be American Nazi, could just be a conflict entrepreneur.

In the early days of AOL chat, there were Jewish virtual conversations that I would enter.  We would type about our synagogue, what we are making for Seder, where we are from.  Invariably Abdul would sign in, deface our screens with some anti-Israel or even anti-Jewish slogan, likely for the purpose of disruption.  AOL provided an Ignore option which any of us could click to exclude Abdul, but we would all have to exercise that choice.  If anyone wanted to retort Abdul, where invariably some of the people connected to that chat room at the time would, he would stay and post more slogans or individual demeaning comments.  We had no mechanism for AOL to deny him access.

Reddit, and some of the other platforms, can deny access.  But to do that requires another consumer of the service taking the initiative to make a report, then a process from which an employee of the platform makes a decision on whether company standards have been violated.  Not a lot different than our highways where people can drive in all sorts of hazardous ways, limited only by getting caught, something that happens a relatively small fraction of the time.  Our police have tried to randomize this with sobriety check roadblocks, radar traps, red light photo cameras.  The IRS monitors tax cheats with random audits.  But our electronic platforms really don't seem to have a better mechanism than depending on annoyed legitimate users turning in troublesome posters as individuals.  It's not a good way to clean up the enjoyment these platforms are intended to generate.  Or maybe they do have automated screening devices.  Or maybe they pay people to log onto places that have hateful posters for their version of the random audit.  Whatever the mechanism, it does not seem to be as sophisticated as it should be.

Redirecting

In anticipation of my monthly meeting of my Representative District's monthly Committee Meeting, I sent the chairman a message of withdrawal.  The activity wasn't me, it never achieved what I hoped it would.

My involvement began with a different district whose activities I greatly enjoyed being a part of.  I got to meet my legislative representatives, finding each thoughtful and personable.  When I commented to them, they commented back.  Scheduled meetings were electronic, as the pandemic was still in its active stage, but with precautions, we were able to meet in person on occasion in a reception type setting.  And the officials were always there.  They were invariably gregarious in their own ways, interactive with me.  I got to chat with other members of the group, finding out a little about them.  Nobody gathered to pitch their personal agendas.

Our Constitution requires a formal census every ten years, which has become the Zero Year of each decade.  So in 2020, the inhabitants of America were counted with reasonable accuracy given the enormity of the project.  People were assigned to their categories, primarily by principal residence.  From that, our state legislators created new districts for US Congress and state legislators.  My district's boundaries were shifted in the process.  That delightful man who displaced my own personal friend in the last primary would no longer be my state representative but the state senator would continue.  Party Committees were by representative district.  The path of least resistance would be to shift my neighborhood's committee representatives to the district of their new representative.  Nobody contested my seat, making me a presence on Zoom the first Monday night of each month when the Committee met.  A year or so later, I had occasion to meet a few at a backyard reception that one of the other people also displaced from my committee hosted, but it wasn't the same as the gatherings of our prior district.  No elected officials.  No restriction of guests to Committee members and their households.  There were some interesting people, most notable to me, a teenager doing her Mormon missionary assignment.  She told me a bit about what they do and how they do it.

The Zoom sessions, however, lacked anything creative and next to nothing interactive, until the end.  Our state rep, around whom the committee was created, appeared on Zoom one time to defend votes he had taken that his district's voters would likely disapprove.  This district spans two senatorial districts.  The Senator from the other district attended a few times.  I found her capable and likable.  My Senator, who I already knew was even more capable, came only one time, and that at my suggestion to the Chair that she be invited, as the majority of our Representative District is in her Senatorial District.  We had some statewide elected officials take their turn.  The State Treasurer made the best impression.  The Attorney General I'd wonder about.  And the County Rep came regularly to update us on things that, if they matter at all, never really change from one monthly Zoom screen to the next.  And I got placed on a phone squad, where I lasted ten minutes of my two hour assignment.

Eventually, as we begin a year with real primaries, two guys on Zoom basically tanked any interest I had on staying on.  A newcomer, a progressive, the kind that made the other party have a real chance at taking over as an enduring national majority, submitted a resolution asking our Representative Committee to endorse his resolution sponsored by a Rep. I politically abhor, one sponsored by scripted anti-Semites know as The Squad, that we as a Committee call for a cease fire in Gaza whose militants thought it would bring them cheer and kavod to massacre whoever they could bring into their path. Despite the large number of Israelis killed, I did not personally know any of them, but I do personally know citizens called up abruptly by the Israeli Defense Forces to show that raids of this type will have some very negative consequences.  And I did know personally the Doctor killed in the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre.  Expressions of any type that we can intimidate Jews with anticipation of violence against them is not at all OK.  It is transformative.  Irving Kristol, a convert from New Deal and 1950s Democrat to the forefront of neo-conservatism, once quipped that a neocon was a liberal who had been mugged by reality.  I became an October 8 Democrat, fully in conformity with all of my statewide officials and the President, who I met many times as Senator.  Policy is run by our elected officials and the experts they appoint.  Our own Washington contingent did not sign on with this.  It is just not a Committee agenda item.  Moreover, Tel Aviv and my Representative District are pretty nice places for people to live.  North St. Louis, the district of this guy's legislative hero, a district adjacent to one where I, and a generation later my son, once lived, and Gaza are not.  Neither has the kind of diligent, tolerant, productive community that our Committee should identify with and preserve. Too many casualties in Gaza, agreed, but a predictable consequence of the leadership.  And North St. Louis could use its own cease-fire, the gun violence center that has decimated the city where I once lived.  And as I discuss my views and my experience on this, it is clear that he and his supporter have zippo knowledge of history, zippo appreciation of who his preferred legislator actually is, and zippo appreciation of what our Committee's purpose is.

I'm still a Democrat, though an October 8 Jewish democrat whose synagogue now has a police officer in a marked city police van situated in the parking lot to chase these guys away when they come by.  The prominent neocons of public stature are no longer Democrats, but still decent people who keep their distance from the MAGA rot that we see on TV.  But the Democrats have their own rot, and I saw some of it at my committee, though not by men of the neocon's intellect.  

George Packer of The Atlantic divided the American electorate into quadrants.  Voting Republican:  Free America, those libertarians who want less regulation, and Real America, those working people who should be democrats, and maybe once were, flipped to the GOP as their livelihoods were made less secure by people who wore ties to work who gave too much of the rewards of their labor to people of entitlement who didn't work.  And on my side, the Democrats.  Smart America, which is me and the statewide officials in my state, indeed my part of America.  We live in places like I live, or in a nice place in Paris, Vancouver, or Jerusalem if we ever decided we wanted to live someplace else.  We spent our time with our homework, took our lumps with equanimity, went to college, got experiences living with people we didn't like, so as doctors and lawyers we understood that we had a certain amount of obligation to people who annoyed us.  We are probably the last of those four quadrants not intent on squashing our enemies, let alone being the slave to our enemy who forces a response.  We have it good, and would like people who don't have it as well to have their chance to elevate their own position.  In that sense, we may be the last descendants of FDR, or maybe even Henry Ford, who made his fortune by also wanting everyone to have their chance at a consumer upgrade.  That's a long way from Gaza or North St. Louis.  The final quadrant also votes Democratic, is and should be represented on our Committee and in our legislators.  Packer labels them Just America.  No question, there are people who struggle as much as because of who they are as because of their own choices when their opportunities come and go.  But resentment dominates over correction.  That is where the two Democratic quadrants separate.  Their enemy is anyone to be blamed for their circumstances and the response is a Gazan response, get even with all those people who made Tel Aviv or Beverly Hills sparkle because they left me out.  

The Jewish lens on this, and at one time the Democratic Party lens was very different.  At the end of our Sabbath morning prayers, there is a short section that does a play on words of the Hebrew Text.  Al tikrah banaich ela bonaich.  Don't read it as your Sons but as your Builders.  It is the builders who create peace.  Smart America and Free America, though we vote differently, are your builders.  Between these groups we generate philanthropy for all to benefit, create commerce, advance science, derive benefit from the educational options available to us, enable communication and travel.  It is the world we aspire to.  While war is destructive, it is probably subordinate to aggression as the uppermost evil.  And impeding a response to aggression, to say nothing of celebrating it, diminishes the world.

And groups really do flip.  When I lived in St. Louis, the Speaker of the State House, a Democrat, lived across the street from me.  Their legislature will never be Democratic again in my actuarial lifetime.  My Congressman was a Democrat as was one Senator and not long after my departure a Governor.  That entire state has flipped.  So has my current one, though in the other direction.  We had one or more statewide elected Republican officials just a few years ago.  I do not anticipate that happening again.  Working people, that Real America, changed parties.  Might we Jews, over-represented as elected officials of the Democratic Party across America, also migrate to a different part of the ballot.  A couple of state would certainly notice if that were to become a reality.  And as I address these Progressive ideologues of my own Committee, I can see some very honorable Jewish people concluding that they need to escape them.

So my role on my Committee.  I live in a good place that elects good people.  Not MAGAs.  Not anti-Semites.  Not people who use their elected office to intimidate but to address challenges.  Some of them seek a new office with more responsibility this year.  They are the people who share my fondness for advancing people.  It makes much more sense to me to pick one or two of the several who have convinced me of their worthiness and join their team to reinforce the decency that the majority of our voters value.  It will take more effort than showing up on Zoom the first Monday evening of each month, but I anticipate the effort a good deal more satisfying than trying to sidestep or placate, or maybe even respect, alliances of convenience whose views reverse decency in some way.